Last week, it was revealed that Google and other leading advertising companies had been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of unknowing Safari users. The Mountain View-based company maintained its innocence and claimed it “used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled.” Microsoft is now claiming that the search giant has used a similar technique to bypass privacy settings in Internet Explorer. By default, IE blocks third-party cookies unless the site provides a “P3P Compact Policy Statement” indicating how the cookies will be used and agreeing to not track the user. Microsoft claims that Google is improperly representing certain cookies, which allows them to pass through IE’s security without disclosing the company’s intent. Google has not responded to Microsoft’s claims. More →

Google’s Chrome 15 browser is now the most popular browser build in the world. New data from StatCounter suggests that Chrome 15 recently reached a total global market share of 23.6% compared to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 market share of 23.5%. Internet Explorer still has the largest global market share if you combine all versions of the browser, however. While Chrome 15 may be more popular on a global scale, that’s still not the case here at home in the United States where it had an 18.1% market share as of December 5th, while Internet Explorer 8 had a 27% share. “Looking at the daily stats, Chrome 14 and 15 have been overtaking IE8 at weekends since the beginning of October,” StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said. “However, Chrome 15 overtook IE8 for the first time during the five day working week, in [the] week commencing [December 5th]. It looks as if people favor Chrome on weekends at home but office commercial use has now caught up.” The full press release from StatCounter follows below. More →

Google’s Chrome web browser surpassed Mozilla’s Firefox in global browser market share for the first time ever in November. Research firm StatCounter found that Chrome’s market share during the month was 25.69%, up 4.66% from last November, and that Firefox’s share was a hair lower at 25.33% during the month. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer maintained its lead with 40.63%. “Our stats measure actual browser usage, not downloads, so while Chrome has been highly effective in ensuring downloads our stats show that people are actually using it to access the web also,” StatCounter CEO Aodjan Cullen said. Internet Explorer remains the top browser in the United States with a 50.66% share. Firefox is the second most popular browser in the U.S. with a 20.09% share, down from 26.75% in November last year, and Chrome is the third most popular browser with a 17.3% share, up from 10.89% last year. Net Applications, another research firm, published similar results on Thursday. By its numbers, Internet Explorer had a 52.64% share in November, followed by Firefox (22.14%), Chrome (18.18%) and Safari (5%). StatCounter’s full press release follows after the break. More →

According to the analytics firm StatCounter, Google’s Chrome web browser now has a 20.7% grip of the web browser market — seven times more than it had just two years ago. The boost comes at the cost of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, which now has less than a 50% hold on the market. Mozilla’s Firefox web browser has a 28% share of the browser market, down from 30% two years ago, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer share fell to 44% from 59% two years ago. According to Reuters, StatCounter gathers its data from more than 3 million websites with more than 15 billion page views. More →

Having long reigned as the king of the browser world, Internet Explorer continued its downward slide in April as its market share fell to a ten-year low. Market share for the Windows-based browser dropped 0.7 percent in April. to 59.95%. Despite its unhealthy losses, Internet Explorer still remains the dominant browser with double the market share of its closes competitor, Firerfox, which made a modest gain of 0.07% to finish the month at 24.59%. While IE stumbled, Chrome was on the upswing, grabbing 0.6 more percentage points to capture an overall market share of 6.73%. Apple’s Safari made a 0.07% gain at the expense of Opera which lost 0.07%. Next month’s figures should prove to be interesting as they may reveal whether the precipitous drop is the result of the EU’s mandatory browser ballot, now in full swing, or merely a bad month for Microsoft.

MIX10 is going strong and this year, the Microsoft conference has been filled with big announcements. Yesterday, we learned about Windows Phone 7 Series development and today, we get a glimpse of what is coming in Internet Explorer 9. The latest web browser from Microsoft stays competitive by supporting several HTML 5 specifications including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and both embedded H.264/MPEG4 video and MP3/AAC audio. Microsoft’s latest web browser also includes a new and improved JavaScript engine that combined with its GPU-accelerated graphics promises to deliver a rich browsing experience. You can test drive the latest browser via an online demo over at Microsoft’s new IE9 website or, if you enjoy living life on the edge of a system collapse, you can download and install the Internet Explorer 9 platform preview. More →

The EU, and various other stakeholders, *cough* Mozilla and Opera *cough*, filed suit against Microsoft in 2007, alleging that the act of only having Internet Explorer installed on the Windows operating system by default was an anti-competitive business move that violated EU antitrust laws. The suit proved effective, as European regulators and Microsoft executives have reached an agreement on how to move forward without the “help” of the courts. Microsoft has consented to a five year contract that requires all copies of Windows in the EU to present the end-user with a “Choice-Screen” that presents an option of 12-browsers to have install. Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, AOL, and Flock all made the short list along with a few lesser known browsers. Microsoft, which has already paid around $1.7 billion in EU fines due to the IE debacle, will face additional penalties if they decide not to honor the five year deal. Microsoft estimates that 100 million current Windows users will be presented with the pop-up while another 30 million will see it as a result of new hardware or software purchases. The “Choice Screen” will be presented to users running Windows 7, Vista, or XP, and will begin showing up next year. More →

Microsoft announced the availability of Internet Explorer 8 today and the preliminary reactions around the net have been pretty good. While betas and RC versions have been floating around for quite a while, the final version of IE8 will be available for your download at Noon EST. With its promised security enhancements, color-coded tabbed browsing and the incorporation of add-on accelerators, IE8 may be worth a try for those who have not already sampled the beta or RC1 versions. Let’s hope Microsoft’s servers can stand up to the demand this time.

Steve Ballmer has been all over the globe lately. First, he was in South Korea teaming up with LG for a future with Windows Mobile in LG smartphones. This week, he made his way to Australia with those loud, powerful and rather obnoxious words, “Developers, developers, developers!” But the excitement died down quickly when a student at Power to Developers event asked, “Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?” Ballmer’s response was that the question was “cheeky, but a good question, but cheeky”. Right, that’s when you know you’ve struck a nerve. After treating the crowd to his usual rant about looking to and anticipating the future, all Ballmer could really say about open-source browsers was that they are “interesting.” Very similar to his feelings about Google’s Android platform.

Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.

So it looks like Microsoft is probably going there, but not all the way there. Catch the drift? Even then, if Microsoft were to show an iota of interest in open source engines like WebKit, it could be huge news for third-party developers and in turn, to end users. We’ll have to wait and see where Microsoft is going with this, but don’t go thinking they’re ready to open up and embrace open source quite yet.

Recent Internet Explorer 8 rumors being tossed around the Web loosely outlined what bloggers referred to as “porn mode”. Basically this new functionality would allow users to easily enable and disable a strict privacy policy, disallowing all cookies and disabling browsing history, search history, and form data / password memory. Microsoft has finally confirmed that the upcoming much needed update to their Web browser will indeed include a secretive browsing mode, though it seems to have opted to not go with the “porn mode” moniker despite its relevance. Andy Zeigler, Microsoft Program Manager, recently detailed what has been dubbed the “InPrivate” feature line within Microsoft’s upcoming eighth Internet Explorer version. Three new services combine to make up the InPrivate package; InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking and InPrivate Subscriptions. When enabled, these three components (along with an automatic history deletion feature) combine to ensure that you can go anywhere you want on the Web and no one will ever find out what a sick, twisted deviant you really are.